Re: -Werror considered harmful

[Pascal Terjan <pterjan gmail com>]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Martin Pitt <martin pitt ubuntu com> wrote:

Colin Walters [2013-02-26 11:55 -0500]:

> I don't believe the baseline approach is "craziness"

Neither do I. I find some selective -Werror= highly useful, and I'd
even go as far as to say that _not_ having any of them is "craziness".
Errors triggered by things like -Werror=implicit-function-declaration or
-Werror=format-security are nothing that you ever should actually
install and run anywhere, and if they happen they are really a bug in
the code, a changed dependency, or a changed toolchain.

format-security has a few false positives where it is actually safe but it fails to know that the format string will be safe as it is constructed by some code making sure of it so there are some cases I don't mind installing (but I agree that it's a good default to have for a distribution to make sure the exceptions are reviewed)

> The problem with the "opt in" approach is then everyone who uses jhbuild
> to contribute to GNOME will basically not be opted in, and it's far too
> easy for them to write patches that fail the baseline.

That's annoying indeed and will lead to longer contribution/review
cycles. But the worse issue is that as soon as you try to compile the
software someplace else with different library header versions or
toolchains, these errors will get ignored and thus lead to
hard-to-debug bugs. If the compiler can spot a bug, we should be happy
about it!

Thanks,

martin

--
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)

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